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Saturday, November 13, 2010

Nine new ones on 30 metres thanks to a big pile-up

I visited the shack of Thos EI2JD on Friday afternoon for a bit of work on the bands. He posed a question to me which was very interesting: "What band do you most need countries on?" Apart from 10 metres, which was pretty dead at the time, the next "busy" band which I most needed to build up countries on was 30 metres. So we connected up his 30m vertical to the antenna switcher and loaded the amp for 400 watts and I started CQing - in CW mode of course.

Within a few moments I was already getting attention. So much so, in fact, that after working just one contact I had a big pile-up. So, for the first time ever, I was able to call "EI2KC UP" and split so that I was listening up one KC from where I was transmitting. In this case I was TX on 10.107 and RX on 10.108. The pile-up was sustained and loud and so I worked them quickly with just their callsign and 5NN (599). In the space of about an hour and a half I worked 145 QSOs. It was great fun. The pressure was intense at times, especially where I was trying to pull a quiet one out of the QRM and someone would keep calling over them.